[Nix-dev] Use Haskell for Shell Scripting

[Michael Raskin]

>> Maybe you need to script it properly? Maybe StumpWM is less rigid from
>> the beginning, though (I use it and extended it for my needs, so I can
>> probably answer your questions if you wonder about it; it is in Common
>> Lisp, by default all the splits are manual, and there are many hooks
>> to perform actiosn on events like window addition)
>
>Thanks!  However, I'd better not switch to a WM that I wouldn't enjoy
>configuring.  Also I think that I've bent xmonad pretty much to its
>limits and hit the abstraction wall.  Nowadays my configuration is a
>whole cabalised package that I install via Nix.  If you're interested,
>it's online [1].

If you hit an abstraction wall, maybe you would actually enjoy doing 
what you originally wanted with access to lower-level abstraction.

>The abstraction wall I hit is StackSet.  It is highly sequential
>(workspaces are lists of windows, there is a mapping from screens to
>workspaces, etc.) and offers absolutely no choice to organise windows
>differently.  What I mean by "too rigid" is having
>
>    f :: Blah X -> M ()
>
>instead of
>
>    f :: (SomeAppropriateClass f) => f X -> M ()
>
>thereby enforcing `Blah` instead of an `f` of my choice.

Well, StumpWM allows arbitrary splits, very useful for Lazarus, Gimp, 
etc.

Maybe you should try Ratpoison and give it commands from a Haskell 
decision-making piece of code? Ratpoison also has arbitrary splits, it
is simpler than StumpWM and can do way less. Driving StumpWM externally
shoud also be easy, although with larger overhead.